Chill Fado

Just as the album title suggests, this is the surprisingly late-in-the-game compilation mixing the resurgent Portuguese musical style of fado (think bracingly complex acoustic guitar patterns, flamenco beats, and hyper-dramatic vocalists, usually female) with the increasingly played-out concept of the chillout album. (In our grandparents' day, they called this stuff easy listening; truly, the conceptual space between Chillfado, Vol. 1 and the '50s work of Les Baxter is vanishingly small.) The combination of classic fado singers and players with a new generation of Portuguese beat artists sounds potentially fruitful, but the majority of Chillfado, Vol. 1 fails due to the generic weakness of the anonymous beats and heard-it-before burbling synth arrangements. There are intriguing exceptions, most notably Renoiser's disassembly of Carlos Paredes' "Plano," which mixes shards of an unidentified female fado singer's wails with a unsettling, harsh synth noise that sounds unnervingly like a cat hacking up a hairball, and Plaster's intriguing remix of Mariza's "O Deserto," setting the singer -- a Madonna-size superstar in her native land -- to a downtempo groove that complements her strong vocals without overpowering them. Most of this album fails because of the general disconnect between the sweaty passion of the best fado and the clinical coldness of most of these dull factory-showroom beats; it's on the songs where the producers match the musicians' energy levels that things get interesting. ~ Stewart Mason|